Various types of consumer products are manufactured in the form of sheets of cloth-like material. For example, one new consumer product of this type may be included with clothes in an automatic drying machine and functions to "soften" the fabric of the clothes being dried. These flexible sheets of "fabric softeners" are most often produced in a continuous sheet of material having preformed lines of weakness at spaced intervals therealong and is normally formed into the shape of a roll.
One class of prior art containers for containing and dispensing a roll of sheet type fabric softeners merely comprises an elongate enclosure including top, bottom, front, and rear side walls forming a tube having the opposite ends thereof enclosed by closure flaps. The roll of material is held captive between opposing walls of the container while the end of the sheet of the material is trained out through a dispensing opening in one of the container walls. As the consumer pulls the end of the roll of material out through the dispensing opening, the roll frictionally engages the container walls, and in some cases, because of the adherence between adjacent layers of the material on the roll, difficulty is encountered in causing the material to properly unroll. Moreover, some problems are encountered in tearing individual sheets from the roll since the sheet of material adjacent the sheet to be removed remains somewhat curled upon the roll so that separation between such sheets is sometimes difficult.
Another type of prior art container suitable for dispensing the same type of product includes a platform within the container which supports the stack of sheets in a curled, elevated attitude to facilitate ease of dispensing. For reasons which will be discussed infra, this type of prior art container was less than completely satisfactory from the standpoint of manufacturing economy.
The present invention overcomes the difficiencies discussed above inherent in the prior art container by forming the sheets individually in a stack thereof and providing an enclosure that not only facilitates removal of individual ones of the sheets from the enclosure, but also maybe collapsed prior to filling the same with product for shipping and storage purposes. According to the present invention, a blank comprising a single sheet of paper stock includes a plurality of essentially rectangular, side-by-side panels separated by parallel fold lines which define a front, rear, top and bottom closure panel that may be formed, by folding, into a tube. The top panel is hingedly connected to the rear panel and may be swung upwardly to reveal an elongate dispensing opening. A platform panel is hingedly connected to the front wall panel along the dispensing opening and extends rearwardly downward within the tube, the rearward edge of the platform panel being spaced slightly from the rear wall panel of the tube to define a slot within the tube. A support panel hingedly connected to medial portions of the bottom panel of the tube extends vertically from the latter and is hingedly connected to the platform panel for supporting the latter. The support panel, in combination with rearward portions of the platform panel along with the bottom panel and rear panel of the tube define a storage compartment within which a portion of a plurality individual, stacked sheets of material may be contained in a curled elevated attitude. One edge of the stack of sheets is trained upwardly through the slot near the rear of the container and forwardly toward the dispensing opening to allow a user access thereto. The platform panel slidably engages and supports a major portion of the stack adjacent the dispensing opening in a manner which facilitates dispensing individual sheets from the stack. A plurality of closure panels hingedly connected to the opposite extremities of the tube may be folded after inserting a product into the tube in order to enclose the ends of the tube and form the fully erected container. The rearward portion of the platform panel is formed from a cutout in the supporting panel to enhance manufacturing economy.